Swaziland cabinet minister Lutfo Dlamini called Swazi people protesting for democracy in the kingdom ‘diseases’.
He told a meeting of diplomats yesterday (6 April 2011) that the 8,000 people who marched on the prime minister’s office on 18 March 2011 demanding the resignation of the entire government were ‘opportunistic diseases’.
His comments were also aimed at the ‘uprising’ expected in Swaziland next Tuesday (12 April 2011).
The Times of Swaziland newspaper today reports Dlamini saying that the ‘people who are sowing seeds of political disharmony among Swazis are nothing but “opportunistic diseases”’.
Dlamini was addressing a group of ambassadors and other diplomats who are based in Swaziland and Mozambique. He was trying to put across to them the measures that the Swaziland government wanted to take to get out of the economic mess successive Swazi governments, handpicked by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, have created.
Dlamini, who has a long history of lying, couldn’t stop himself doing it again yesterday. According to the Times, he told the diplomats, ‘the problems currently faced by the country are purely economical and not political’.
Yesterday, I reported that when Dlamini lied to South African journalists they corrected him and told their readers the truth.
Not so in Swaziland. The Times, the only independent daily newspaper in the kingdom, allowed Dlamini to tell his lie unchallenged.
The Times also reports, ‘Dlamini assured the envoys that government would stick to its role to maintain a friendly and peaceful country.’
We’ll see whether Dlamini is telling another lie next Tuesday when the main teachers’ union SNAT starts a three-day mass protest and the ‘uprising’ coordinated by a Facebook group is planned to start.
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